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Goebbels: A Biography reveals that even the top Nazis were not satisfied with conquering most of Europe. National Socialism had to share their brains with romance. Here are some excerpts:

“I lack a great love in my life,” wrote Goebbels in December. “That’s why all my love goes to the great cause.” At the end of 1924 he got to know Elisabeth Gensicke: “A bit old, but nice and affectionate. Reminds me very much of Anka.” A little affair developed: “Why don’t I feel any inner conflict when I leave Elisabeth to go to Else,” he asked himself when he set off for Rheydt just before Christmas. But he quickly dispelled such pangs of conscience: “My heart is big enough to hold two women at once.” So he spent Christmas and New Year’s with Else, and in between a long evening in Elberfeld with Elisabeth. “Tomorrow I’m seeing little Else! Elisabeth on Friday!” he exulted. “Both are looking forward to seeing me, and I’m equally eager to see them! Am I a cheat?

In July he spent a night with Alma Kuppe, Else’s best friend, who was on a visit to Elberfeld. Later, his great fear was that the two women would exchange notes.74 “Is it possible to love two women at the same time?” he asked himself.

Short-term marriage was a much better way to make some cash 100 years ago in Germany:

Magda Quandt, twenty-nine years old at this point, was a cultivated and well-educated young woman of elegant appearance, self-assured and completely independent. Her mother had divorced her husband, the Berlin building developer Oskar Ritschel, in 1905, and married the leather-goods magnate Richard Friedländer, who adopted Magda. In 1920 Magda met the industrialist Günther Quandt, who was nearly twice her age. The ill-matched pair were married in 1921. At the end of 1921 her son Harald was born. But the couple soon drifted apart. Quandt was interested in little but the expansion of his business empire, and he neglected his young wife, who was left with the household to run as well as no fewer than six children to bring up. Apart from Harald, there were two sons from Quandt’s previous marriage, and he had also taken in the three children of a friend who had died. Overburdened, Magda yearned in vain to play an active part in the cultural and social life of 1920s Berlin. After Quandt discovered that Magda was having an affair with a student, he separated from her, and in 1929 she succeeded in obtaining a financially advantageous divorce. It was agreed that Harald should live with his mother until he was fourteen, and then—as the future heir to a business empire—live with his father.

[See the International chapter of Real World Divorce for how a child in Germany may have only 1/20th the cash value of the same child in Massachusetts or California and how a German plaintiff could only dream of the “permanent alimony” available in Florida.]

Goebbels apparently thought that what had happened to Rich Guy Quandt could never happen to him…

Goebbels and Magda spent July 1931 as guests of Magda’s grandmother at her house in the Schleswig-Holstein seaside resort of St. Peter-Ording.1 “Magda is like a mother and a lover to me,” he wrote. “She loves as only a great woman can.” He was enjoying himself: “Work, love, sun, and happiness. What more do I want?” But there was a “shadow” over all of this happiness: “Magda loved somebody else before me. That pains me and tortures me.” The man in question was certainly not her ex-husband, Günther Quandt, but Magda’s lover from the last years of her marriage. When Magda told him about her past love life, he found her “heartless” and was regularly overcome by fits of jealousy: an argument always ensued.

Goebbels is not the only admirer of the hot rich divorcee:

Hitler took a liking to Magda. Though Goebbels was pleased to hear Hitler’s “fabulous verdict” on her, he was less pleased to note that his interest in Magda did not stop there. … To Goebbels’s great annoyance, during this visit there was some flirting between Magda and Hitler: “Magda is letting herself down somewhat with the boss. It’s making me suffer a lot. She’s not quite a lady. Didn’t sleep a wink all night. I must do something about it. I’m afraid I can’t be quite sure of her faithfulness. That would be terrible.” Goebbels didn’t extend his judgments to Hitler himself: “However, I don’t begrudge the boss a little heart and charm. They are so lacking in his life.”

Running the Third Reich can be lonely:

In the evening, at a private reception, Hitler “conversed about questions of marriage”: “He feels very lonely. Yearning for the woman he can’t find. Moving and touching. He likes Magda very much. We must find him a good wife. Someone like Magda. Then he’ll have a counterweight to all these men. …

He also worried once more about Hitler’s private life. At the end of January he stayed in his apartment in the Reich Chancellery until 3 A.M.: “He tells me about his lonely, joyless private life. Without women, without love, always full of memories of Geli.” A few days later Hitler came back to the topic: “Women, marriage, love, and loneliness.” And with obvious pride Goebbels remarked: “It’s only me he talks to like this.”

Hitler has a reputation for making war, but in the domestic realm he also made peace:

The argument continued the next day, and Magda refused to go with him to the Bayreuth Festival as planned. So Goebbels went to Bayreuth alone. Hitler, whom he met there for lunch, was “appalled that Magda isn’t with me” and arranged for a plane to bring her from Berlin. … After the performance Hitler invited them in for coffee in the little house he used when in Bayreuth: “He makes peace between Magda and me. A true friend. He backs me up, too: There’s no place for women in political life.

“A good lawyer knows the law; a great lawyer knows the judge” was also the rule back then (well, maybe “a great lawyer knows the Fuhrer”):

At this time Hitler helped with another piece of Goebbels family business. According to the divorce settlement between Magda and her first husband, on completing his fourteenth year their son Harald was supposed to move from his mother’s household to that of his father. With this deadline approaching, Goebbels made every effort to annul the agreement. To this end, he applied massive pressure in his dealings with Quandt’s lawyer. He prevailed without too much difficulty—after all, a few days after the birth of Hilde, Hitler had promised him his full support.

A successful custody litigant can have additional issues:

His relationship with Magda was constantly marred by intense arguments, as for example in May 1936, when after a daylong argument Goebbels was contemplating moving out of the villa on Schwanenwerder, which Magda had just finished lavishly decorating. … Around this time, in August 1936, it was from Rosenberg of all people that Goebbels learned of an “unpleasant business with Lüdecke.” Quite evidently this was one of Magda’s affairs, which she initially denied and then confessed to him.

It will be interesting to see if the romance, squabbling, and custody litigation subsides as World War II picks up…

 

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Goebbels: A Biography contains these interesting sections:

“Eventually there will be an alliance of the two Germanic peoples,” was Goebbels’s summary of Hitler’s views in May 1936. This hope seemed to be reinforced when Mussolini annexed Abyssinia in May and proclaimed the Italian king emperor of Ethiopia: “The Führer’s alliance with England will now be almost automatic.” For Goebbels’s benefit, at the end of May Hitler put a name to the prospect he visualized coming out of an alliance of this kind: the “United States of Europe under German leadership. That would be the solution.”

Goebbels noted that while attending a small soirée in January—Magda was also among the guests—Hitler had indicated that he was “determined on a major war with England”: “England must be swept out of Europe and France must be deposed as a great power. Then Germany will be dominant and Europe will have peace. That is our great, our eternal goal.”

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I was on the phone with our little company’s little bank, wondering why a $5000 charge had been declined. The banker explained that the limit on our card was $3000 per day. “It is to protect you,” he said. “Federal law makes banks liable for fraud on consumer cards, but for business cards we are not responsible.”

Bank of America explains in large print that they offer a $0 Liability Guarantee under Fraud Protection. How about the fine print? “The $0 Liability Guarantee covers fraudulent transactions made by others using your Bank of America consumer credit cards and consumer and small business debit and ATM cards.” (emphasis added)

Could this be a significant difference between the monster banks that we all love to hate and the little banks for which we have nostalgia? And what about BofA’s “small business debit” note? Does that mean a “big business debit” card opens a company to unlimited fraud liability? How about the limit to “consumer credit cards”? Are all business credit cards a potentially serious liability for the company?

[In fairness to the little bank, the phone was answered by a human and I was connected to a banker who could solve our problem within 10 seconds. That doesn’t happen too often at one of the megabanks!]

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The Europeans have an advertised policy of welcoming anyone who shows up in Europe as a “refugee” as long as the person faces some sort of threat back in his or her home country.

Suppose that a government finds that 25 percent of its citizens are some combination of (a) poorly educated, (b) unproductive, (c) disabled, or (d) imprisoned following criminal convictions. This group of people is a drain on the treasury through a combination of welfare payments and prison expenses. Certainly there is no hope of collecting tax revenues from these folks.

What stops the government from saying “If you fall into one of these categories you will be executed on June 1, 2016, but we are also pleased to offer you a plane ticket to Germany or a trip to the coast of Germany or Sweden.” Perhaps the Germans won’t let planeloads of refugees land every day and disembark, but can they stop a foreign government’s ship from unloading refugees into rubber boats just off the coast yet still in international waters? Due to the death sentence advertised publicly, all of the refugees would be eligible for asylum under EU rules.

Thus a country can unload its most economically burdensome citizens any time that it wants to. Instead of spending oil wealth on welfare, for example, an oil-rich state could have its least educated citizens supported by German and Swedish taxpayers. This would leave the remaining population, but especially a dictator or royal family, substantially wealthier.

Ordinarily one might argue that it is cruel to cast a person loose in international waters, but with Swedish and German taxpayers promising to provide free housing, free health care, free food, etc., the unwanted citizens of a less-developed country should be better off in Europe.

Obviously this hasn’t happened yet so there is a flaw in the above argument somewhere, but the question for readers is… where is the flaw?

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A friend’s Facebook posting:

Question for FB friends. My stepdaughter is getting married this weekend and she just called today to ask him if it’s okay for both my husband and her mother’s new husband to walk her down the aisle. What do you think?

A sampling of responses:

• I think if her step dad earned her love and respect and this is her day, it would lovely if he could be honored and is valued enough to be able to do that. If I had a step child and I raised/loved her and vice versa, I would have loved to be able to do that as a co-parent, esp being a step parent. It would make me feel very loved and a part of the family. Btw, what are the reasons to not “allow” it? Isn’t this HER wedding and special day? How horrible it would be to be told what to do on your wedding day esp when it is against what you really want to do…
• (from the stepmother’s mother) Absolutely NOT!
• Beautiful! That’s what family is about
• Absolutely! If she wants both men to be a part then they should!
• I would do what ever makes the Bride and Groom happy – it is their day.
• Yes. It is HER wedding!
• And as for the, “It’s HER day” camp, NO IT’S NOT. That is also a ridiculous notion that has gotten completely out of control. A wedding is a social ceremony, not every girl’s one chance to be a Disney Princess. Disney princesses are not real.
• Absolutely! What an honor for both men!
• It’s Her day. Tradition be damned. The question might be, is this really what she wants or is she being pressured?

I asked a divorce litigator for perspective and she responded with “If the stepfather is that important, the father shouldn’t even show up to this one. If the girl is a typical child of divorce there will be at least a couple more. By the third one she will be able to pay for a nice wedding herself with the child support and alimony collected from the first two marriages.”

What do readers here think? Is tradition (one father in the aisle at a time) more important than the bride’s preferences or vice versa?

[Backstory: The mother of the bride sued the father in California nearly two decades ago. As with 94 percent of California cases (Census March 2014 data), the mother was the winner in the winner-take-all system. Once she had established a claim to a share of a Silicon Valley salary at California child support guideline rates, she moved herself and the child to a low-cost-of-living part of the American South. At that point the father-daughter contact became infrequent and the stepmom described the situation as “He is pretty much an ATM.” Stepmom: “Mom collected relatively fat child support and a daycare allowance through high school, even though she didn’t have daycare from the age of 10.” The plaintiff mom eventually found a new companion who wanted to share in cashing checks from the defendant father and thus the cash-cow child acquired a stepdad. Both the mother and the stepfather have jobs, together earning more than the biological father. From the child’s perspective, however, the biological father remained the primary source of cash and the stepmom reports “she asked her dad to pay for the wedding.”]

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“Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District” is a New York Times story about some immigrants and/or their children who have been unable to adjust to American cultural norms:

But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold’s letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, who has come to see the district’s increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.

“My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” Ms. Foley said.

On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.

”What is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.

The district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the first in their families born in the United States.

The article is also notable for the fact that the superintendent, holder of a “Ed. D” degree, is referred to as “Dr. Aderhold” by the Times. The Times style policy says the following:

Dr. should be used in all references for physicians, dentists and veterinarians whose practice is their primary current occupation, or who work in a closely related field, like medical writing, research or pharmaceutical manufacturing: Dr. Alex E. Baranek; Dr. Baranek; the doctor. (Those who practice only incidentally, or not at all, should be called Mr., Ms., Miss or Mrs.)

Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title, but only if it is germane to the holder’s primary current occupation (academic, for example, or laboratory research). Reporters should confirm the degree holder’s preference. For a Ph.D., the title should appear only in second and later references.

Also see the related “As Graduation Rates Rise, Experts Fear Diplomas Come Up Short” (nytimes): “In California, South Carolina and Tennessee, the authorities have recently eliminated requirements that students pass exit exams to qualify for a diploma.” (i.e., the high school diploma is the new junior high school diploma) Here’s an interesting reader comment:

I’ve been teaching HS [English Language Arts] in the NYC Public Schools for 13 years. Standards keep getting lower and lower. … drop below a 70% pass rate and watch how fast you’re on the spot. And of course, thanks to years of “education reform” efforts, it’s all the teacher’s fault. A kid doesn’t do homework? Teacher’s fault for giving too much homework. Solution: adopt a No Homework policy as a means of achieving “social justice”. A kid who lives in a shelter/ in poverty/ witnesses violence fails? Teacher’s fault for not reaching out enough or providing enough “socio-emotional support”. Kid can’t pass a standardized test? Make the test easier and rate the teacher down. It goes on and on. It’s all about profit, union breaking and moving money to consultants and charters. … School-to-prison pipeline in the news? Stop suspending and remove consequences for bad behavior. If chaos follows, blame teachers for poor classroom management. The smart kids can make the numbers so why bother with them? Focus on getting the lowest performing to reach minimums. Then everyone goes to college because everyone needs to be in debt forever. If kids show up most of the time and aren’t too horribly behaved, they believe they should pass; that’s what they’ve been taught. …

And some comments from folks at the next stage in the pipeline:

As a college professor for 25 years, I often wondered what kids were learning in High-School. They can’t name the 3 branches of American Government, the name of the state’s Governor, nor some of the most basic facts of the world. … It is anti-intellectual to such an extreme extent, that so many students have no interest in their world outside of sports and entertainment. Rigorous study, such as outlining a textbook to truly lean the material is out of the question.

As a college instructor I am struck by the deficiencies in basic reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills I see in my students who have made it to college and are not classified as remedial. Their skills are lower than those of family in my parents’ generation who were non-native English speakers with only a high school diploma. … I have to adjust my grading to avoid giving everyone C’s and D’s so that I stay in line with my department.

As a college instructor, I see this every semester. Students will try to do anything to get out of reading, think reading ten pages is way too much, and their ability to comprehend what they are reading is astonishingly low. Many of them have no idea about history beyond their lifetime and even then it is relegated to popular culture. Their writing is horrendous. The international students I teach are much more prepared and often have a greater command of the English language than native speakers. … college instructors find it difficult to teach advanced concepts and subjects to students who are about as educated as a third-grader was in 1950.

It is not just poor students or the schools in the South. Before retiring I taught engineering at a major NY university. At one point we noticed that entering students seemed to lack the necessary math skills and decided to test all entering students. The idea was to give remedial training to those found lacking. To our surprise we found that almost half the students with poor basic skills (Algebra, Trig) had been AP honors math students in well rated high schools. We came to the conclusion that the high schools were skipping or skimming the basics so that the student could move on to resume-building AP Calculus courses.

I was a community college history professor for twenty two years,crediting in 2013. My students came from two of NJ’s wealthiest counties. By various measures, the preparedness of my students declined sharply over these 22 years. What I found astonishing was that 68 per cent of high school graduates had to take remedial classes in English and/or math. An increasing number of my students were clearly unable to read or write at a college level. When I used graphs or charts, the numeric illiteracy ws appalling. I had earlier run two businesses. At the end of a semester with 34 students, often I would identify 3. Or 4 students who I would have considered hiring.

How does it look to a parent?

K12 teachers are trained, in ed colleges, to “deliver content”. All learning, all knowledge, is reduced to “content” … I watch as my daughter and her friends are taught, in a blue-ribbon, self-celebratory school district, complete garbage by well-applauded teachers who just plain don’t know very much and don’t want to hear that they don’t know enough to be teaching. You get this scramble to do with standards because by and large the people who develop standards and write tests are either overeducated itinerants or professors who actually know something in their fields. The K12 teachers then scramble to pretend that they are meeting the standards, usually by buying and serving up, with terrible literalness and poor fidelity, some curriculum advertised as standards-meeting. The teachers themselves, for the most part, are not capable of generating curriculum on the fly that does meet the standards. They just don’t know enough. Worse, they don’t know when they’re misinterpreting what they’re reading and heading off into intellectual garbageland. The children, of course, are none the wiser, but do know they’re supposed to pass the tests, so they stuff it all in, then let it fall out again.

My kids have gone to both public high school and public charter high schools. Unfortunately, all these schools have a significant number of kids who would rather not do any work. This is regardless of race or economic status.

To an employer?

While in the US Air Force we found it necessary to write our technical orders for some of the highest technology in the world at the 5th grade reading level so our young enlistees could understand what they were required to do. All our enlisted were high school graduates. We wrote the technical orders for the officer corps at the 11th grade level to meet the average capability. All our officers are college graduates.

Related:

• Smartest Kids in the World Review

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In “Is the new Zuckerberg fake charity an estate tax avoidance scheme?” I looked at the implications of Mark Zuckerberg putting $45 billion into a standard for-profit LLC that is owned by himself and other family members.

New Yorker magazine assigned its top financial correspondent and its team of fact-checkers to produce this article on Zuckerberg’s financial shuffle. It starts “When Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, announced that he would be donating ninety-nine per cent of his Facebook stock to a new nonprofit organization … the donation …”

Yet even Zuckerberg’s PR team hasn’t characterized the for-profit LLC as a “nonprofit organization” (typically organized as a C Corporation and then applies for 501(c)(3) status). And the use of the word “donation” is kind of strange when the money is either not changing ownership (Zuckerberg personal account to Zuckerberg LLC shares owned by Zuckerberg) or moving from parent to child (Zuckerberg personal account to Zuckerberg LLC shares owned by kid).

The rest of the article goes on to talk about “foundations” and “philanthropies,” neither of which would seem relevant to this new for-profit LLC.

I’m not surprised that a member of the general public would have seen the headlines on this Zuckerberg family restructuring and remembered “donation” and “charity”. But how is it possible that New Yorker and its fact-checkers would conflate these concepts?

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Microaggression alert! Last week I was ordering something from a company in Texas and the salesman signed off with “Have a blessed holiday.” (Cisgender-normative alert! I assume that this deep-voiced person named “David” identifies with the male gender, but I didn’t ask directly.)

In that Texas spirit I would like to wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas! And also make a wish of my own…

The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World gives us a reminder not to judge people by teenage behavior: Humboldt “was now the most famous scientist in Europe and admired by colleagues, poets and thinkers alike. One man, though, had yet to read his work. That man was eighteen-year-old Charles Darwin who, at the very moment that Humboldt was being fêted in London, had given up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh. Robert Darwin, Charles’s father, was furious. ‘ You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching,’ he wrote to his son, ‘and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.’”

So that’s my Christmas wish! We forgive the teenagers.

You might ask, what evidence do I have that we do not already do this? One of our flight school customers is a 35-year-old guy (surprise!). He hasn’t been able to solo because he can’t get the FAA to issue him a medical certificate that would enable him to act as pilot-in-command. From what disability does he suffer? He was arrested for DUI at age 18, i.e., 17 years ago.

Second aviation story: a 28-year-old whom we know dreams of joining the U.S. military and flying helicopters. (Me too! But of course discriminating against old people in employment is perfectly legal for the government.) At age 18 he was driving a car from which a friend shot a paintball gun at a house. He was charged with “felony vandalism of more than $5000”. This charge was ultimately reduced to a misdemeanor but just having the arrest (not a conviction) on his record means that he would need a “moral waiver” to get into the military. Despite folks talking about how the military doesn’t pay enough and/or doesn’t pay veterans enough, there are so many Americans trying to get into the military currently that no moral waivers are being issued. Had the paintball incident occurred just a few weeks earlier, he would have been 17 years old and there wouldn’t be a record of the misbehavior.

In an economy increasingly dominating by the government, there are an increasing number of areas where if you’re on the wrong side of the government you can’t work or exercise other privileges accorded to other citizens. I would like the Christmas Spirit applied so that at least most infractions that happen through age 19 can be forgiven after 5 years.

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The Dutch painting show at the MFA runs through January 18, so it is a perfect Christmas vacation activity with the kids.

Rembrandt’s “The Shipbuilder and his Wife” is worth the price of admission and the accompanying sign notes that it is owned by one person: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. It is possible to live well in England if you can have a Rembrandt in your bedroom! Vermeer’s Astronomer is there, saving you a trip to the Louvre.

Try to not let the kids linger at the sign next to Jacob Backer’s “Half-Naked Woman with a Coin”. The curators note that “prostitutes earned far more than women who performed manual labor.” You don’t want to have to explain to them that having a one-night sexual encounter with a dentist in Massachusetts pays better than going to college and working!

There are signs encouraging visitors to post pictures on Facebook, etc., but cell phone service is poor in the underground galleries. The museum’s MFAGuest WiFi network was advertising its SSID and five bars of signal strength, but wouldn’t accept connections from my iPhone. Is running a public WiFi network simply beyond the skills of Americans?

I went with my mom and we enjoyed a great lunch at Bravo, so apparently cooking and serving is easier than running WiFi!

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If you have children, a house in the suburbs, and excitement consists of the big minivan trip to the grandparents’ house, grab a box of tissues before reading “Globetrotting Digital Nomads: The Future Of Work Or Too Good To Be True?” (Beth Altringer, December 22, 2015; Forbes)

Who is choosing to work from laptop in Bali?

The largest group among nomads were people like Andy, frustrated professionals in their thirties (42%) leaving corporate careers that they didn’t enjoy (often in finance and consulting) and taking advantage of the fact that those careers had helped them build a cushion of financial security. When we asked what prompted the choice to go nomadic, the specific reasons differed, but the arc was strikingly similar. They had not enjoyed their work for a long time, and a crisis—of identity, or relationship, or change of circumstance—nudged them to make a major change.

#sickwithenvy as we go into the Boston winter, of course (we are going to be suffering from a high temp of 70 degrees on Christmas Eve; #beskepticalaboutglobalwarming + #butdontbuysealevelrealestate), but I wonder if this is another example of how things haven’t panned out as early Internet users envisioned. The “death of distance” we expected back in the 1980s hasn’t panned out for too many of us. Could that change with 100 Mbit service and more immersive video conferencing? Some lawyers invited me to visit Louisville, Kentucky in early January and I was able to talk them down to a Skype session on their Fortune 500 client’s awesome network and on my Verizon FiOS connection. I will be saving quite a few hours of travel time, if not enjoying the beach in Thailand.

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